Green gold The avocado's remarkable journey from humble superfood to toast of a nation

Those looking for a fact-laden ride through the avocado's nomenclature and geographical history will be delighted by this work. Supported by their studiously researched, annotated bibliography, historian Allaback and journalist Parsons offer up an encyclopedic history of the creamy, green fruit. Rising from the tropics to Florida to California, this "superfood" eventually outgrew the name "alligator pear" to become the much more palatable avocado, an Anglicized version of ahuacate, rooted in the Nahuatl language spoken in central Mexico. The throwback recipes that helped market the avocado are included here--everything from avocado salad to guacamole and toast--and will be familiar to twenty-first-century palates. The avocado's journey from pricey delicacy available only to the upper echelons to something nearly everyone can enjoy today can be traced through the work of explorers and business people eager to introduce new fruit to the burgeoning world of U.S. agriculture. Readers interested in this type of agricultural history will surely dog-ear pages of this biography of one of the most ubiquitous fruits consumed in the country today.

Historian Allaback (Marjorie Sewell Cautley) and journalist Parsons offer a comprehensive history of the nursery owners, scientists, marketing whizzes, and health experts who transformed the avocado from an exotic equatorial fruit into a multibillion-dollar industry. Beginning in the early 20th century, the account explores "the race" to "discover the avocado best suited to California" and the most effective techniques for battling the state's weevils and deep freezes. The authors also trace how marketing decisions and political developments bore just as much responsibility for avocados' ascendance. Examples include the canny dropping of the fruit's prickly original English-language name, "alligator pear"; the PR push to explain that the avocado's black skin should not be interpreted as "spoilage"; and the controversial 1997 lifting of a 1914 quarantine of Mexican and Central American avocados, which "powered an unprecedented boom." The narrative sometimes gets mired in painstaking details about avocado associations and international avocado-finding expeditions; it's at its best when the authors focus on the more digestible evolution of how the fruit was marketed to American consumers--from expensive luxury food "confined to the banker, the retired capitalist" to "stand-in for... joy, healthy living, fleeting pleasure" and 21st-century "millennial aspirations." Early 20th-century recipes also entertain (avocado was served "raw and cooked, from cocktail to ice cream"). Readers may find this a bit too much to chew on, but there are some appetizing morsels. (May)